


What They Say About Misery

by greenkangaroo



Category: Naruto
Genre: Cheating, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Happy Ending, Loneliness, M/M, Polyamory, Self Harm, he doesn't mean to be, it's like blink and you miss it but better safe than sorry, shikamaru is a bit stupid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 10:59:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11758410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenkangaroo/pseuds/greenkangaroo
Summary: Nara Shikamaru got married, and he made one person miserable. Then time went on, and he made a second person miserable, too. You know what they say about misery and company.





	What They Say About Misery

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written in response to a prompt on tumblr and the raw form can still be found there.

Chouji makes it through the wedding because his feelings are genuine.

He is genuinely happy for Shikamaru.

He genuinely likes Temari.

He genuinely believes she is the partner Shikamaru has always needed and he genuinely wants to share these feelings with them.

Chouji is also genuinely a mess, and when he goes home that evening he makes sure all of his doors are locked and the next week is clear on the calendar.

Chouji doesn’t even need to make a hand seal anymore to slow his monstrous metabolism to a crawl. He drinks seven full bottles of honey wine with three sake chasers.

It’s easier to deal with how ugly and spiteful and downright mean he is inside when he’s drunk as hell.

He can’t even look at himself in the mirror, because he knows those feelings are genuine, too.

They’re all he has left now.

—

It isn’t like Shikamaru ever promised Chouji anything and Chouji reminds himself of this when he feels misery coat the back of his tongue, when getting out of bed is hard. They had their Moments across the shared years. Some were swift as a great fireball, some slow burning as an hours-long detonation tag. All of them had been with the understanding that it wouldn’t last, couldn’t last.

They are the heirs of the Nara and the Akimichi, respectively. They have responsibilities, to their clans and to Konoha.

Chouji knows responsibility well. It is his rock, his temple, his daily prayer, and the chain that strangles in the middle of the night.

Chouji greets Shikamaru and Temari when they come back from their wedding trip with a smile and gets rid of the rest of the alcohol.

—

Chouji cuts himself from Shikamaru’s life as efficiently as if he were a medic with a chakra scalpel.

It’s depressingly easy to do. Shikamaru is actively working with his father now, learning how to be the Advisor Naruto will someday need.He’s busy all the time, far busier than he ever wanted to be in their youth. It’s simple to cut their twice weekly lunch down to once every other week. It’s child’s play to take streets to the training fields that don’t run into any of Shikamaru’s habitual paths.

Piece by piece, bit by bit, Chouji erases and tells himself it is better this way. They are still friends, they are still comrades, but Shikamaru is a husband now and will eventually be a father. Life goes on. Things change.

Ino notices but she doesn't say anything. Chouji is thankful she doesn't. Ino has spent pity on him that would be better spent elsewhere. 

Besides, she's busy too- her father has declared he is retiring within the next three years, the last war finally burning him out. Ino's not ready and she knows it. Between all the late training sessions, the paperwork, taking on a genin team Chouji hasn't seen her for more than twenty minute spans in months. 

It’s really for the best. Adult life is messy and Chouji has always been the tidier of their trio. So he sweeps up and does his best not to mourn what's in his dustpan. 

—

Chouji isn’t sure what he is expecting when he comes home and is told by the gate guard that he has a visitor, but Temari is not it.

“Is everything alright?” He asks her, because what other reason could she have for visiting if not disaster?

She assures him everything is fine, and she knows it’s unexpected but she was hoping to take a few moments of his time- maybe have some tea? She’s been to Konoha for diplomatic visits and war councils but she lives here now and she’s uncertain.

She knows Chouji is approachable. She would like to know him better.

Chouji thinks, quite seriously if only for a second, about telling her to get lost.

Instead he makes tea.

—

It becomes a weekly event, every friday afternoon. Chouji bids his genin team goodbye and returns home where Temari is waiting. She brings things, sometimes- tea cakes, a favorite blend from Suna.

She brings stories too- most in recent years. She has few from her early childhood and Chouji doesn’t ask why.

Chouji tells her about Konoha. They sometimes take walks and he shows her where the good produce is, where the clouds can be seen the best.

He gives advice when she wants it, holds back when she doesn’t. Temari is refreshing- he doesn’t have to read her like he does Ino, or even Shikamaru. Temari says what she thinks and wants what she wants.

Sometimes they talk about Shikamaru. 

—

Maybe Chouji should hate Temari, but he doesn’t.

There is too much love in Temari, rough and tumble Suna-born Temari with her stubborn ponytails and the dusting of freckles on her cheeks.

Temari is what the Akimichi call a Big Eater. She takes everything life can give her and what she gives back is a hundred times what she takes.

Temari is thorny and blunt, cautious and afraid. Temari wants to be a good wife and eventually a good mother but she wants to be a good ninja, too. Temari loves Shikamaru ardently.

Chouji can’t hate someone he shares that with, no matter what any of Ino’s favorite trashy romance novels say.

—

Aside from useful herbs and plants Nara Yoshino has never been a cosmetic gardener. 

After claiming a small corner of the growing plots Temari is determined to become one come hell or high water 

"They say nothing grows in the desert," she says to Chouji as she digs with the single-mindedness of an Iwa ninja covering a mine, "but that's not true." 

Chouji shows her how to hold the small spade properly, gently. She's picked easy flowers that match well, bloom year after year. She was envious of Ino's calla lilies. 

"What grows in the desert?" Chouji asks. 

Temari tells him as they plant.

"My mother," she says, "painted flowers." 

That night Chouji stops by the library and gets a book on the horticulture of the Land of Wind. 

\--

Shikamaru isn’t home often.

It bothers Temari and she tells Chouji that. “I understand,” she says, “that he’s learning a lot now. It's amazing, really, such a lazy ass choosing a path like that. But.”

“But you want him to be considerate of your feelings, too.” Chouji replies.

“Yes.”

“Shikamaru can’t focus on one person’s feelings,” he says to her, confiding a great and painful secret, “because he has to think of everyone.”

"That's stupid." 

"I know," Chouji commiserates, "it wasn't like that when we were kids. Then, you know." 

Temari doesn't let the shadow of the war hang around. She pouts a little, sticking her lip out. It’s adorable.

“Well if that's the case why bother getting married at all? Isn't that just troublesome?” She scrunches her eyebrows up just like Shikamaru does and grins at the boom of laughter she gets from her friend. 

“Maybe,” Chouji admits, “but he sort of had to. You’re the most troublesome woman he could find, and the Nara attract the best kind of troublesome.”

Temari laughs until she snorts and punches him in the shoulder.

—

“You’re spending a lot of time with Temari,” Ino says to Chouji.

“She needed a friend. I’m pretty good at that.” Chouji says.

“No, I mean,” Ino gives the empty street a significant look, “you’re spending a LOT. of time with Temari.”

Chouji gives her the flattest most unimpressed face he can manage and Ino is decent enough to look chagrined.

“Just,” she says, hesitating a moment before taking his hand in hers, “be careful, Chouji. Please?”

“Aren’t I always?” He asks.

He’s far enough away not to hear when Ino murmurs, “No.”

—

Temari is a little drunk and she’s just asked Chouji to have sex with her.

“No.” He says firmly.

“What if I told you it was for fertility problems?” Temari wheedled.

“No.”

“Unsatisfied at home?”

“No.”

“Lots of fights?”

“No.”

Temari considers him, with her cat green eyes and her predator’s smile. “What if I said I wanted to know what I was missing?”

A little place inside Chouji quivers but he stomps on it with every ounce of not-inconsiderable willpower he possesses. “No.”

“What if I brought a permission slip?”

That throws him for a loop. “A- what?”

She smiles wider and he feels like he’s lost the edge in a battle he didn’t know he was fighting.

“Time to go home,” she says, and leaves him sitting in his kitchen and staring at the sake cups on his table as if they have betrayed him.

—

Chouji avoids Temari for a couple of weeks. He’s sent on a mission- escort to the Land of Earth, hardly glamorous but blessedly quiet. He gets to meet up with some comrades from the war, swap old stories.

When he comes home Temari arrives the next friday. She says nothing about the last time they spoke and Chouji is thankful for it. It was too confusing, too painful, too-something.

When she leaves that night she stops on his porch and says, “I have to ask you a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you love him?”

Chouji doesn’t answer. He can’t speak, not that he needs to. He can see from the way Temari’s eyes soften that his stricken face has betrayed him.

Temari kisses him on the cheek and walks silently down the path. Chouji watches her disappear around the bend before he goes inside. He lays in bed and bites his tongue until it bleeds. 

—

Chouji would like to say that it just _happens,_ but that’s not true.

Temari is wading in the pond out behind his little house. Her legs are long and tan and well-formed and she smiles at him.

It’s a new smile, this one. It’s a smile of shared hopeless adoration for idiot geniuses who can handle shogi strategies with thousands of moves but can’t unlock the secrets of the human heart.

Or bedroom, as it turns out.

For the first time in his life Akimichi Chouji makes a decision knowing the inevitable consequences will hurt himself, possibly his status within the Clan, his career as a ninja, and the only man he has ever loved and would willingly die for.

It is completely and utterly selfish, greedy and gluttonous, and it ends with his head between Temari’s legs and her fingers caught in his hair, making high little noises that she’d stab him for calling adorable.

—

They compare and contrast, in bed.

“You’re so much softer than Shikamaru,” she says, prodding his chest. “but there’s iron underneath.”

“Wouldn’t be worth much without it,” Chouji tells her, and nibbles the heel of her hand. Temari is a draper- she stretches out over the whole of his bed and god is she a pretty picture.

"He's all elbows." Chouji says. 

Temari groan-laughs. "I can't even tell you," she says, rolling over and managing to lose half her robe in the process. "Still, he does make up for it if he cuddles." 

" _If,_ " Chouji reminds her and she runs her fingernails up his arm before pouncing. 

\---

It is surprisingly easy to keep up appearances. 

Chouji sometimes tries to guilt himself into breaking it off. He runs through scenarios in his head- Ino confronting him, Shikaku finding out, his father finding out. 

Shikamaru walking in on them. 

Nothing moves him. It is as if this delicate dance has become a black hole which sucks up all his cares and concerns. There is his work and there are his friends and there is Temari and the shadow of the absent man they love between them. 

Chouji examines his motives from every angle. He could say it is out of pity for a woman abandoned by a husband who loves her but doesn't quite know what that means. He could be a little more honest and say it's some form of vengeance, coming from that dark place inside that wonders why he wasn't good enough in the first place. He could be brutally honest and admit that he is weak and he is sad and that damn it misery loves company and Temari is lovely company indeed. 

All of these are in some form true, and can be boiled down to an inconvenient truth Chouji is learning to embrace: he is a glutton for punishment. 

—

Chouza begins making noise about grandchildren and Chouji meets a few potential brides just to get some peace and quiet. He has a tried and true test, which he shares with Temari; if he drops food on himself and gets a look of pure disgust, she’s out of the running.

Thusfar no one’s made it past the first course.

Temari doesn’t mention the first time they went out to eat together in public, just a married woman and her husband’s best friend. She doesn’t mention how Chouji did get a little bit of barbecue on himself, or how she swiped it off his front with a napkin.

—

“This,” Temari says to Chouji, “is excellent training.”

She has just extricated herself from his bedroom cupboard, where she was hiding after an unexpected visit from Ino and Sai. She rolls the kinks out of her neck.

“Next time try the trunk,” Chouji says to her. “More room.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Temari grins and grabs him by the belt.

—

The gate guards didn’t tell Chouji he had a visitor- they stopped informing him about Temari ages ago but his front door is ajar and Temari does not leave the door ajar. She doesn't enter the house at all if Chouji isn't home. She sits in the rocking chair on the porch and waits.

No.

Someone else leaves the door ajar, too far ahead to even think about closing it in a place he has been safe since he first toddled there as a child.

Chouji takes the deep breath of a condemned man who goes to his execution at peace and mounts the steps to his home.

Shikamaru isn’t waiting in the living room or the kitchen. He’s in the bedroom, looking out the window. He turns when Chouji enters, hands in his pockets. He doesn't look very good- a little feverish and drawn. 

“Shikamaru?” Chouji asks. “Why are you here?”

Shikamaru focuses on Chouji and his eyes are somewhat glazed. As a young man he would have been crouching, fingertips touching to form an orb. He’s thinking as fast as he can. Chouji considers leaving him to it. Stave off the inevitable a little while longer.

“Are you fucking my wife?”

There’s no accusation, nothing. Shikamaru could be asking about the weather.

Chouji has never lied to Shikamaru, but between his brain and his mouth the simple ‘yes’ warps to, “Does it matter? You’re not.”

Chouji swears he hears his bedclothes-trunk say, “Ouch.”

Shikamaru covers his face with one hand. His shoulders are shaking. Chouji wonders quite genuinely if he has just been the straw to break the brilliant camel’s back and is amazed to find that he is not repentant, he is not worried, he is angry.

He is very angry.

“You left her alone, Shikamaru. You left me alone for her, and then you left her alone!”

This is it, the ugly pit at the center of the rotten fruit that Chouji has been gnawing on for almost two years now. Shikamaru left him with little explanation, expecting him to know because Chouji always knows, and to accept it without question, only to go on and do the same thing to the woman he'd wed. 

Damn it Temari deserved better. 

_And you know what,_ says a small voice in the back of Chouji's mind, _so do I._

“Who started it?” Another toneless question. Chouji could pick his best friend up and shake him like a terrier, he’s so frustrated.

“I did.” Chouji says, because he did, because when Temari came out of the pond and reached for the towel he took it instead and he dried her legs and his hands just kept sliding up until she fell forward onto him so yes, this is his doing, all of it, and if Shikamaru is looking for someone to blame Chouji is built for burdens like that.

“Why?”

There’s something there now but Chouji is too far gone to hear it.

“Because if I can’t have you and she can’t have you at least we can be miserable together.” Chouji says.

There is a moment of pindrop silence. 

“Be careful what you wish for, Shikamaru,” the bedclothes trunk says. “You just might get it.”

The top lifts and Temari waves at Chouji. “You’re right.” She says. “Definitely more room.”

—

Shikamaru knew the first day.

Temari had come home from the pond and its pleasant aftermath and he had looked at her and he had known.

He'd gotten angry at her but it had been surface anger, easily broken down by a cock of her hips, a lift of her brow, and a reasonable "If you're so jealous, why don't you go over there and get a good hard fuck, too?" 

Shikamaru had stared at her and then he had begun to cry. 

"It was the most pathetic thing I'd ever seen," Temari says to Chouji as she pours them all tea. Shikamaru mutters into his elbow but he doesn't look up. He hasn't, not since Temari popped out of the trunk. 

Shikamaru had wanted to think about it so Temari had let him think, in her own way. 

"Sometimes I'd give him play-by-plays," she admits, "just to watch his ears turn red." 

"It's a lovley shade, isn't it?" Chouji agrees. He's reached a level of careless nirvana, uncertain of what is reality and what is a dream. 

Shikamaru had taken too long to think, and Temari had demanded he do something, "because this isn't good." she says, "for any of us. It's a lot of fun, but it's not good." 

It had been Temari's idea for Shikamaru to confront Chouji. It had been Shikamaru's request- plea, really- for her to stay. 

Ergo, the trunk. 

"I need one of those." She says. "Who do I have to talk to?" 

"I'll ask Pa about getting one made," Chouji says. "Belated wedding present or something." 

"Perfect." She nudges Shikamaru. "Don't you have something to say?" 

Shikamaru drags his gaze up to meet Chouji's. 

It's a whole conversation like the thousands they've had before and Chouji can see the moment Shikamaru descends into self-loathing over the forgiveness Chouji is wordlessly offering. 

"I love you," Shikamaru tells Chouji. 

"I love you too." Chouji says. 

"And I love your smoking hot body," Temari says to Chouji, "although if pressed I can admit to being rather fond of everything else, too." 

She kisses one forehead, then another. 

_Nothing grows in the desert my ass,_ Chouji thinks. 

\--

They move from the kitchen to the living room and sit on the couch. 

“Never did get that permission slip,” Temari mutters against Chouji’s thigh. He pinches her, keeps focused on Shikamaru, who is looking everywhere but at the two of them.

“Men.” Temari grouses. “It doesn’t have to be this hard.”

“But-” they both start at once.

Temari whacks Chouji on the shoulder, reaches out and drags Shikamaru onto the couch with a snarl. “It DOESN’T.”

Shikamaru is pressed up against Chouji like he was when they watched clouds together.

How long has it been since they’ve watched clouds?

Shikamaru is pressing harder, as though he could disappear into Chouji if he tries hard enough. Chouji lifts an arm. Shikamaru wraps both of his around him.

“You were gone,” Shikamaru whispers. “just like that.”

“It was easier.” Chouji says.

“Was it?” Temari asks.

“I thought it was.” Chouji amends.

“Good boy.” Temari replies, and sits on their shared lap.

\--

Temari doesn't cry until Shikamaru is asleep, head pillowed on Chouji's lap.

"I wanted to tell you," she says, "but what if he went the other way? What if-" she cuts herself off and says, "I couldn't stand giving you hope like that to watch him crush it." 

There are all sorts of tangles Chouji knows he should be concerned about but he finds it easier to pull Temari to him. She fits neatly against his side.

"I understand," he tells her. He does. They are the actions of a person used to protecting others even if they didn't want to be protected. 

Temari sniffles against his shoulder. She can't promise she won't ever lie to him (they are ninja, after all) but the way she holds his hand with hers tells him infinitely more than she could know. 

Temari falls asleep, too. The night stretches out like this: Akimichi Chouji sitting on his couch, Nara Shikamaru laid out on his right and Nara Temari snug on his left and the breathless frightening possibilities just beyond the darkness of the door. 

\--

They keep the friday schedule as best they can. 

Shikamaru still can't be there often but when he does come around he's learned not to skulk at the door. 

Chouza is still making noise about grandkids. Shikamaru's got someone in the Law archives working on it. 

Chouji works, he cooks, he loves a husband and a wife, he tackles the responsibility of telling Ino and is perfectly imperfectly genuinely-

happy.


End file.
